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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

OnLive: Using the Cloud To Play High-End Games on Any System

One of the most impressive demonstrations at the D8 conference was of OnLive, a cloud-based service that lets consumers play high-end games that otherwise would not work on their systems and play with their friends over great distances.

Steve Pearlman of OnLive demonstrated games such as Borderlands that he accessed from a variety of PCs. He explained that the games were hosted on what he termed "the largest supercomputer in the world" (at least in terms of real-time graphics performance). Players just need to be online and within 1,000 miles of one of the company's data centers, which cover the continental U.S. The company has developed special codecs and low-latency software to make it work just as if you were on a high-end gaming system.

Pearlman showed features such as selecting games and watching other people playing games. He even demonstrated playing Borderlands from an iPad, and said it would work on a smart phone as well (although the iPad application is only a technology demonstration for now.) And he demoed an inexpensive device that could plug into a TV and allow people to play on that screen instead.

While this was designed initially for gaming, Pearlman said the technology would be applicable to other things as well, such as movies. The product was announced at the Game Developers Conference at $14.95 a month, but Pearlman said prices were likely to come down, with more details coming out at E3 later this month.

Another impressive demo was of Wordnik: It's SmartWords project goal is to gather all the words on the Internet and enhance them, by understanding how they are used. The demonstrator, a former dictionary editor, pointed out that there are more words online than in the dictionary and that many specific industries use lots of technical terms.

For instance, she said, the product could create a smart glossary for Scientific America or give a real explanation of a technical term in a finance story. More interesting, she noted how if there was a song referenced in any text, it could automatically pull up the lyrics or the song or pull up SAT-worthy words out of text (such as Twilight.) By understanding the context, she said it could do a much better job.

She said this would be an open standard, and SmartWords would be providing data feeds that publishers could use in a variety of applications. It looked quite useful.

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